The Kid in Me

The Kid is always looking for the kid I used to be. Always wanting him to come out to play.

Sometimes that kid in me is there. Out of the blue, he'll show up. He'll start singing silly novelty songs like "The Purple People Eater," "The Monster Mash," or "Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini." Songs that the adult I am today had tucked away in the far recesses of my brain. Saving them up just so that The Kid could laugh at them, just like I did when I was a kid.

Other times, more frequent than I prefer to admit, that kid in me vanishes. I wonder where he goes. And if he’ll ever return.

A couple weeks ago, after I placed on The Kid’s head his Winnie the Pooh knit hat, he asked, “Why you no wear hat?”

“Why don’t I wear a hat?”

He looked up at me, eyes straining to see over the fold of the hat that covered his brows. “Uh-huh.”

His was a logical question. Why would I be imposing on him to wear a hat with ears on it if my own head didn't need one?

“Daddy doesn’t wear hats,” I told him, cringing even as I said it. The prosecution would jump all over my bare head.

“Why you no wear hats?”

“Why don’t I wear hats?” It was at this point in the interrogation that I’m pretty sure there was a short-circuit in my brain. Because when I knelt down, the words that came out were, “Daddy doesn’t like hats.”

I'd fallen into his carefully set trap. Oh, and here’s another confession, son: Daddy don’t like vegetables, either. And he’s not a particularly big fan of baths.

You could also see the monkeys churning inside that little head, trying to process it all.

“Why you no like hats, Daddy?”

The truth was, there was a time when I did like hats. When I was a kid, my Cubs baseball cap was pretty much sewn into my cranium. You couldn't pry it off of my head. Sometimes I even slept with it on. But as I got older and started to notice girls and what hats did to my stringy hair, well, the hat came off – and never went back on.

How do you explain that to a three-year-old? The answer, of course, is, you don’t. You change the subject. Or pretend that you didn’t hear the question. “Okay, we’ve got to go. Your mom’s waiting for us.”

A week later, another question. “What you be for Halloween?” He’d just been asked by a teacher at his daycare what he was going to be. At age three, he gets asked that a lot. At age forty-four, I don’t.

“I’m just going to be Daddy.”

He looked up at me, eyes straining to see over the fold of the hat that covered his brows. “No, what you going to be?” The hot lights shone down on me. Or was it just the sunlight?

“I’m not going to get dressed up.”

“Why?”

“Daddy doesn’t like costumes.”

You’d think that I’d learn from my prior mistakes, but, evidently, I don’t. There was a time in my life when I did like to wear costumes. Except for those cheap dime-store ones where snot would collect on the inside and the elastic would pinch the back of my head. But, again, that was when I was a kid.

Now the thought of dressing up in costume, well, it frightens me. But the reality is that the kid in me is still there, hiding behind the mask of an adult. Just waiting to jump out of a closet when The Kid least expects it.

Together we'll sing the lyrics from "Witch Doctor" that had been buried in my brain for over thirty years:

Ooo eee, ooo ah ah ting tang

Walla walla , bing bang

Ooo eee, ooo ah ah ting tang

Walla walla , bing bang.

And The Kid will smile.

Tooning In: Scooby-Doo and the Father-Son Connection

A long time ago, in a place not so far from where I am right now, both geographically and mentally, I was a kid. And when I was a kid, I did kid things. A few of my favorite kid things were tossing the ball against the house, cracking open packs of baseball cards and pestering my little sister. I was, quite obviously, easily entertained.

Like most kids, I was also hooked on TV. Long before satellite or even cable TV, the choices were few. In my house, there were six channels. Imagine a world without the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon or the Cartoon Network. That is the one in which I grew up in. Yes, kids, a world like that actually existed. I see them shuddering right now, at the very thought of such an empty world.

What we did have were Saturday morning cartoons. After five days with your homeroom teacher, nothing was better than curling up in front of the TV and watching three hours straight of nothing but cartoons. This was Kid Time. I can't help but feel that kids today, spoiled by being able to watch cartoons 24/7, are, somehow, missing out on one of the true treasures of childhood – a special time that was just theirs. That, to me, is what Saturday mornings were.

By 1969, I was seven years old and already an established cartoon connoisseur. That year, man walked on the moon for the first time. However, much like today, a war in a faraway land divided America.

A scene from "What a Night for a Knight", the first episode of Scooby-Doo, Where are You! It was on a Saturday morning of that year, September 13 to be exact, that Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! made its CBS network debut with its first episode, "What a Night for a Knight."

At age seven, I didn't fully comprehend war, and I guess that adding thirty-seven years to my life hasn't changed that much. Cartoons were so much better than the real world outside my doors. Grown-ups don't always get that.

In 2002, Jamie Malanowski of the New York Times commented, "[Scooby-Doo's] mysteries are not very mysterious, and the humor is hardly humorous." You have to wonder if Jamie Malanowksi bypassed childhood and went straight to grown-up.

I suppose that purely from a grown-up perspective, Scooby-Doo is, well, rather immature. Isn't that the reason we, as kids, enjoyed watching it so much? We liked the idea that there was no situation Scooby wouldn't put himself in, just for one more Scooby Snack. And wasn't there a certain comfort in knowing that there really were no ghosts or monsters in the world, and that when the Mystery Inc. team pulled off the mask at the end of each episode, there was always a person (albeit, in cartoon form) behind it.

Before I became a parent, I spent a lot of time in front of the Boob Tube, watching mostly mindless programming. There's nothing wrong with that, we, as adults, need escapes from reality now and then.

When I became a parent, time became more precious to me. Something in my life had to give if I was going to continue to be a working father – and a writer. That's when I turned off television in my life, and I was surprised to find that I really didn't miss it.

At some point in my child's early development, a little before age one, I suppose, Mommy and Daddy began to realize that the TV set could, on occasion, temporarily fill the need of babysitter, so that we could actually get things done around the house, like bathing, cleaning and eating. At first, there were Baby Einstein videos. Then came the Wiggles and Thomas the Tank Engine. Next were the Little Einsteins and Dora the Explorer. As our child grew older, he wanted more and more – and, oftentimes, he wanted a parent to sit and watch with him.

So, for the second time in my life, I had reached a point where the bulk of my TV-viewing was in the form of programming aimed at kids, or cartoons. The difference being that now, watching them as an adult, I didn't find them in the least bit entertaining. Baby Einstein videos bored me. The Wiggles and Thomas made me squirm. The Little Einsteins and Dora annoyed me.

One day at the neighborhood video store, The Kid and I were browsing through the kids section, as we ordinarily do, and he picked up A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, one of the many incarnations of the Scooby-Doo mystery series.

The Pup series came after my time as a kid. The series follows the same format as the original series, the only difference being that the Mystery Inc. team – Scooby, Shaggy, Fred, Velma and Daphne – are all kids. You see them before they, well, grew up. Watching it with the mini version of me was kind of like being in an alternate universe, where there is you as a kid and you as a grown-up.

The Kid, like me thirty-seven years ago, has become a Scoobaholic. He can't seem to get enough of Scooby-Doo and his gang. He even makes Scooby-inspired jokes. When I tell him I don't want to do something, he says, "How 'bout for a Scooby Snack?"

The other day, the two of us, together, watched that very first Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! episode, "What a Night for a Knight." I don't recall whether my father watched it with me back in 1969. My guess is that he didn't, but I like to think that he did, and that there really is an alternate universe where there are no ghosts or monsters.

Sleeping on the Job

For two-thirds of the day, I am every bit the enlightened, modern-day dad.

My paying job doesn't take priority over my job as a parent. I don't come home late from work. I don't bring work home with me. My paying job never takes me on the road.

And my time at home isn't spent hiding out in the garage, tinkering with the car, or playing poker with the boys. Most of it is spent with The Kid: jousting with him, taking him to the park, reading to him, watching Disney movies with him.

Little of my time at home do I spend on me. Almost all of it is devoted to The Kid.

There are, of course, exceptions. Those occasional night-out escapes or the guilty pleasure of a sneak peak at the ballgame on TV. But most of my time at home that isn't spent with The Kid is committed to household chores, like washing dishes, doing the laundry or preparing dinner.

From sunrise to sunset, I pull the parental weight in ways that our ancestor dads never did.

Then I go to sleep and punch the timecard.

For most jobs, a sixteen-hour day is a long one and you'd pat yourself on the back for having put in the overtime.

But, as any Mommy or Daddy knows, parenting is a twenty-four-hour-a-day job. You're always on call.

For the first two years of The Kid's life, this was true for me. Through the toddler years, Mommy and Daddy split nighttime parental duties. One night was Mommy's night; the next was Daddy's.

But something happened around the time The Kid turned two, and he was freed from the confines of his crib. He began to voice his preferences, and almost always, it was for Mommy.

So when he would come racing out of his bedroom in the middle of the night, he'd cry out "Mommy-Mommy," like a monster had just poked its head out of his closet. Being the good Mommy that she is, Mommy would calmly and reassuringly take The Kid by the hand and lead him through the dark hall back to his bed. Then she would lie down next to him, on waiting blanket and pillows on the floor, until he fell back into his dream world, at which time she would trudge back to her adult bed.

After this became nightly ritual, sometimes occurring more than once a night, I began to tune out the cries. On the rare occasion that I hear anything at all, it is typically no more than a brief sleep disturbance, no worse than the trains and the trucks that rumble by outside our window. I was literally sleeping on the job.

Since these post-crib awakenings began, Mommy had never been away from The Kid overnight. There were nights out with the girls, or work or social meetings that kept her out of the house in the evenings, when the Kid went to bed, but she would always be there, in her bed, when he woke at night and came into our bedroom crying for her.

Until the other night, that is, when her paying job called her away overnight. After two years of sleeping on the job, I was again a round-the-clock parent.

This was a job I'd done before, so I was confident that I was equipped to do it again. But like any job that you've left for awhile and then tried to return to, you tend to forget just how hard it is.

By the time I finally got The Kid to sleep, it was 9:30 PM. I'd spent the better part of the past hour with him, camped out on the floor next to his bed, trying to get him to sleep. When I was finally able to lift my head from the pillows on his floor, I made my way to the bathroom. What I saw in the mirror startled me. Through sleepy eyes, I saw a tuft of pillow-styled hair protruding out of my cranium. Out of that tuft of hair, there were dozens of gray hairs – more than I'd ever seen on my own head before. As I wildly plucked them from my head, I wondered if one night as Mommy had done this to me.

In bed, I tossed and turned. Invading my thoughts was the fear that I might turn into a silver fox overnight.

At some point, I fell asleep, until I was awoke by the pitter-patter of little feet and the cry of "Mommy-Mommy." I shot straight up out of bed, and there at the edge of it stood The Kid.

"Where's Mommy?"

"Mommy's away at her meeting. We talked about that."

As he rubbed his eyes, I made my way around the bed and took him by the hand, just like Mommy. After a pit stop at the potty, I led him back into his bed and camped out next to him on the floor.

About twenty minutes later, I was back in the adult bed, the one with an actual frame and mattress.

I don't know how long it took for me to fall asleep this time, but when my alarm went off at 4:40 AM, it felt like I'd just gone to sleep. Dragging my tired body to the bathroom, I was relieved to see in the mirror that I still had hair that wasn't gray. I shaved, turned on the shower and stripped off my shorts and T-shirt. With one foot in the shower, I heard that now familiar pitter-patter of little feet and cry of "Mommy-Mommy."

I stood there naked to my son, and explained all over again to him that Mommy is Daddy today.

By the time I'd finished reading him a book at his daycare, and he hugged and kissed me good-bye, I was thankful for having been given the opportunity to be Mommy for a day. And even more thankful that Mommy would be coming back home later that same day.

Kids and Dentists: The Unbrushed Tooth

The ideal time for a child's first visit to the dentist, according to the American Academy of Pediatric Dentistry, the American Dental Association and the Academy of General Dentistry, is at approximately one year of age.

Uh, pardon me while I cough up a crown, but if there's one lesson that I've learned in life it is this: There is no "ideal time" for a visit to the dentist. Unless getting teeth pulled is your cup of tea. On my personal scale of things I least like to do, opening my oral cavity to a dentist ranks just below opening my anal cavity for a proctologic exam.

There are, apparently, philosophical differences of opinion in the medical community as to when a child should first see the dentist. I'm not sure what most pediatricians tell parents, but ours told us that it was okay to wait until The Kid turned three before subjecting him to the horrors of the dentist chair.

When faced with competing medical advice, I have found it always best to do what is best for the child. In other words, hold off for as long as you can. Or until you can't stick another lollipop in your child's mouth without feeling the weight of parental guilt.

Parental guilt for us set in just after The Kid turned three.

Ever the dutiful parents, we did our best to prepare The Kid for his date with the dentist chair. That meant reading to him a Dora the Explorer book about a first visit to the dentist – over and over and over again. Dora the Explorer makes a first visit to the dentist seem like a stroll in the park. In Dora's world, all kids leave the dentist with a big smile. Initially, The Kid seemed to take this rosy portrayal hook, line and sinker.

Three-year-olds, though, are so much smarter than the books written for them. The evening before his dental appointment, I first began to sense wariness about his pending date with the dental chair. He wasn't going to be the easy catch going in with mouth wide open as I'd hoped.

We, as parents, had been advised to schedule his appointment at a time when he would be in a good mood, as if there is predictability in a three-year-old's mood. We arrived at nine in the morning, on a Saturday, in an empty parking lot.

The dentist that we chose had come with high marks from our pediatrician. His daughter, just a few months older than The Kid, had just started seeing this particular dentist. As it turns out, the pediatrician and the dentist share the same building. We, as parents, thought this might be a good thing and make The Kid a little bit more comfortable. We couldn't have been more wrong.

To get to the dentist's office, you have to walk down a dark stairwell. In the eyes and mind of The Kid, I'm pretty sure that we were walking down into a dungeon. The dentist's office, it turns out, is underground, buried below his pediatrician's office. For three years we've been going to the same pediatrician without knowing what went on below, or even that there was a below.

Pediatric dentists today are much more sensitive to the fears of children than when I was growing up, way back in the dark ages, when the dentist would pretty much throw you in the chair and start yanking out your teeth. The modern dentist, in contrast, uses the first few visits to socialize children into the dental setting. These so-called "happy visits" are designed to make a visit to the dentist not seem so daunting for kids and are tailored to the child's level of maturity and self-confidence.

This all sounds nice and progressive in theory, but as with so many things, reality rears its ugly head, which is what I was expecting on top of the dentist. To my surprise, this dentist looked more like a fairytale princess than an old witch. The Kid, however, saw right through her outward charms. Upon seeing her, he backed away, as if he'd just seen the face of a monster. The crocodile puppet with the oversized teeth that she wore on one of her hands was a dental prop intended to make her seem more friendly but only seemed to frighten him more.

For about five minutes, like a mob collector, I struggled and bargained with The Kid in the lobby outside the dentist office, but not even a promise whispered in his ear that there would be a trip to the toy store if he would just go in and sit down in the dentist chair calmed him. Then Mommy made the inevitable sacrifice, lassoing him and putting herself in the dentist chair and The Kid in her lap. While Mommy buckled him in with her arms, Daddy brushed the teeth of the crocodile puppet before moving on to the teeth of The Kid. If the dentist was building up trust with The Kid, that all went down the spit bowl when she asked him to open his mouth so that she could count his teeth. It turns out that The Kid takes after The Father and doesn't like opening his oral cavity to dentists. Frustration evident in her eyes, the dentist literally took matters into her pink plastic gloved hands, forced his mouth open and counted all twenty teeth while The Kid put up a fight that made The Father proud.

When it was all over, the dentist gave The Kid one of her pink plastic gloves, which she had inflated with an air squirter, and a clean bill of oral health. The Parents, meanwhile, got their parental guilt rinsed clean and a bill for $40.

A Better World

When you're the parent of a three year old, you're living in a world that exists somewhere between reality and fantasy.

Part of that world is not unlike the one you knew before. There's still the evening news with nothing but bad news. There's still a job to do so that you can pay the bills. And there are still cooking and cleaning to do back at home. But all of these seem just a little more complicated now that there's a kid in your world. The bad news on the evening news makes you fret over the world that he will grow up in. Getting to your job and doing the cooking and cleaning are not as easy as they once were because, well, there's that little gremlin always to deal with, tugging at your legs.

But the other part of the world is filled with fairy tales and swashbuckling adventures. It's a pretty cool place, filled with all that wide-eyed wonder and innocence that is childhood but tempered by the knowledge and experience that comes with age.

Years ago, I'd kicked out of my life the likes of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy. All because they weren't real. What a terrible thing to do.

But now, thanks to The Kid, they're back, and my world is a better place for it. They're no more real than they were before, but they are to my son. So, even though I know that they don't exist, I act as if they do.

All parents live in this fantareality world. Getting to see the world through a child's eyes is perhaps the greatest gift an adult can get. Because it opens the door to a world that you once lived in but which had been closed to you for much too long. You can once again believe in the unbelievable. The impossible can become the possible.

Vacations are not the same as they were before you became a parent. Captain Hook is not just a Disney employeee in costume but is actually the Captain Hook. And the tick-tock you hear is not your own alarm clock at your bedside but is inside the belly of an oversized hungry crocodile.

Jousting at the Bristol Renaissance FaireWeekend excursions are not the same, either. The knight on horseback at a Renaissance faire is not just an actor but is truly jousting for king and country. And when he raises his lance in victory, you cheer because of the skill and daring he has displayed and not because he is  following a staged script. Sure you know that the competition is fixed and that the winner is predetermined, but you pretend that it is not.

A Disney cruise and a Renaissance faire are not things that I would have done before I became a parent but they are things that I do as a parent because they are the world that my son lives in. It is a much better world than the one that I knew before he came along, and I feel fortunate that he has reintroduced me to it.

Just a year ago The Kid wanted nothing more than to grow up to be a chimney sweep, just like Bert (Dick Van Dyke) in Mary Poppins.  But that life's aspiration went up like a puff of smoke. And not just because he figured out that it was a job that required cleaning, a task that for him falls on the disagreeable scale somewhere between walking and bathing.

No, what happened is that he discovered his true life's calling is to be a knight in shining armor. He foresees a world where he'll get up in the morning, slip into his armor, and go off to work, a sword in his belt and a lance in hand, as a knight. His days will be spent jousting, guarding the castle and protecting his king.

You know that one day, not too far in the distant future, he will wake up with the knowledge that there are no jobs for knights in the world today. Only ones for actors whose job it is to put on a knight costume and a good show.

That's part of life, part of growing up.

You wish it didn't have to come to that. The world today could use a few good knights in shining armor.

I'm just thankful that I have a son who lets me live in a world where they still exist.